HOLY FIRE BLOG

A couple years back, theologian Scot McKnight in a CT article described the so-called emerging church as "one of the most controversial and misunderstood movements today." Then he cited writers Aaron Gibbs and Ryan Bolger who define emerging churches as "…communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures."

Even taking into account practices they describe as essential to these communities, one finds little variation from what the church—every church—should be. So where does the emerging come in? Why emerge rather than just be? It all sounds rather uppity and judgmental, like, "We’re the ‘should be’ getting away from the dregs we leave behind."

McKnight also observes lightly, "It is said that emerging Christians… drink like Southern Baptists—meaning, to adapt some words from Mark Twain, they are teetotalers when it is judicious…[but] evangelize and theologize like the Reformed—meaning they rarely evangelize, yet theologize all the time."

And this clue may help unravel the enigma that so-called emerging churches are yet today: they are closer to Mark Twain than McKnight imagines. Indeed, beyond fitting Twain‘s quip, like Twain they cannot escape the tug of the birth canal, the tie to what birthed them squalling, bawling, and bloodied into an upside down world. If they are at all the church, they cannot escape being the church. However emerged they may think themselves to be they are not really.

Let me explain.

First, Twain, too, was an emerging believer in his own ‘gospel’ who never quite made it—to the fully emergent side of his faith, I mean. He remained always tied to what he desperately wanted to run away from.

Further, Twain certainly fits McKnight‘s analogies cited above. On the one hand, while not a Baptist, he drank like one: abstaining when judicious just long enough to win the hand of his beloved Olivia ‘Livy’ Langdon. Twain affirms in a letter, "I shall do no act which…Livy might be pained to hear of—I shall seek the society of the good—I shall be a Christian…" He followed this with another note assuring Livy‘s mother he would "never taste wine or spirits upon any occasion whatsoever; I am orderly, and my conduct is above reproach in a worldly sense; and finally, I now claim that I am a Christian."

A Twain scholar sees in these two letters "a type of spiritual progression; the first indicates a desire to become a Christian, the second contains a declaration of faith…considering the yearning for faith…and his lifelong fascination with biblical themes, it seems likely that this struggle for faith was at least partially genuine."

Even so, the same scholar observes, "this flirtation with orthodoxy was short-lived…shortly after the marriage, some of the piety did disappear, and Twain did begin to slip away from whatever doctrinal orthodoxy he may have attained."

Twain wears the emergent Baptist shoes rather nicely.

On the other hand, Twain writes, "I was brought up a Presbyterian…I was sprinkled in infancy…. It affords none of the emoluments of the Regular Church – simply confers honorable rank upon the recipient and the right to be punished as a Presbyterian hereafter…"

Continue reading "Mark Twain‘s Adam: the Proto-Emergent Un-Emerged" »

Posted by paul at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You’ve heard of magic lanterns, and missional communities have been a hot topic for quite awhile. But what does one have to do with the other?

Not much, unless someone makes a deliberate connection.

Or unless Joe and Melissa Johnson of Watching Theology, found on Steve Brown, Etc., reminds us quite unintentionally that they might have quite a bit in common; and in reminding us, offer a graphic lesson in how to do church for the church that really wants to be Jesus’ church—which is, by the way, a missional community.

However, such lessons were not the intent, as far as I can tell, of Watching Theology in their review of Winter Light, a film by the noted Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), who made a career of convinving us God was gone—away on business, as Tom Waits sings. The review was just the first thoughtful piece in an ongoing "Silence of God" series that film, theology, and philosophy buffs should check out. Even so, if you make a ripple in the pond you have to accept disturbing a leaf floating by as a consequence. And if that leaf floats a little sideways anyway…

Well, they made the ripple; this leaf has been disturbed and hopes to disturb you, the reader of this post, in turn. Indeed, I hope to disturb you with the connection between magic lanterns and missional communities.

Ingmar Bergman’s film career began with the former because it may have been missing the latter. And I am willing to bet Bergman is not the first nor the last whose career trajectory, indeed whose life path has been shaped—for good or bad—by what was not there at the beginning.

A vacuum attracts debris indiscriminately. Our mission as the church of Jesus is to be there in the place of the vacuum to deflect the debris, when possible, while always filling space-time with what really makes things go…

Continue reading "Of Magic Lanterns and Missional Communities" »

Posted by paul at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you caught the live broadcast (March 4) of the California Supreme Court hearing oral arguments for and against California’s Prop 8 you witnessed the pageantry of political expediency and moral equivocation in motion. At the same time, there emerged from the blur of posturing a barely clear thematic overlay of sincere people flailing about for a solution like a drowning man grabbing at fistfuls of air wishing to catch a life preserver that wasn’t there.

In the end, political posturing won the day; there was just nothing real to hold onto.

The Court signaled that it probably would uphold Prop 8, while not invalidating gay marriages already on the books; in short, it will offer a convoluted decision leaving a conundrum in place—whatever that may mean!

But this is just the point. The Court bore witness to its own loss of meaning as a symptom of a larger social malaise: the essence of what it means to human escapes us.

That it is not crystal clear that gay marriage is an abomination to God, an affront to humanity, and a denial of the fundamentals of humanness is proof of a societal darkness leaving us as ignorant of ourselves as an orangutan is of table manners. Impulse, appetite, and opportunity remain our constant companions in darkness, hounding ghosts of a civility that once was, making a mess that makes even the biggest monkeys proud but leaves humans retching their guts out in a gutter along a trail to nowhere.

Not civil enough any longer to know what humanness is, let alone have the courage to state it clearly, the Court grasps at what is merely momentarily opportune—the will of the voters— to avoid saying what should be stated clearly: that marriage is more than impulse, appetite, and opportunity—hormones, hunger, and a handy partner—which is what raw sexual drive is, hetero or homo. Marriage requires the richness of—dare I say it?— pure human sexuality, not in the sense primarily of holy but just untainted, unadulterated, and organic: human sexuality in its natural state forming an integral element of the whole; human sexuality serving its vital role distinguishing male from female in a vital union from which marriage springs.

Continue reading "The Curious Case of Orangutans and Organic Sexuality" »

Posted by paul at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The previous post on this Blog ended as follows:

• "But also, this seal of approval is based on the value rising out of celebrating the differing roles. There is no greater threat to human value than forgetting, ignoring, or deliberately blurring the differences…."

In fact, I recommend you go to that post, "THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE GUY WITH GALS," and read it before you read this. You will find it by scrolling down or following a link in the column to the right. But doing so is not essential. This post will make sense either way; but that post adds flavor.

At this writing tomorrow—Thursday March 5, 2009, to be exact—the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for and against California‘s Prop 8—the ban on gay marriage.

The issue is inflammatory enough to have sparked demonstrations, debates, and open hostility. GOD HATES GAYS, shouted one sign at a recent fracas on a local college campus, even as a professor of law decried Prop 8 as an affront to the fundamentals of human justice. It is only fair, he argued, that gays be allowed to marry—and he meant each other: same sex marriage equals justice in his world.

But not in God’s world.

Of course, neither in God’s world does anyone wave signs selling hatred as a virtue.

One error on both sides of the issue is to elevate raw human will to the level of supposed noble causes: to blame one‘s own hatred of gays on God, for example; or to exalt one‘s own sentiment about gays to the level of justice, on the other. Both are arrogant expressions of rebellion against God, replacing God’s will with human opinion. Neither have anything to do with what God really thinks of gays.

To discover that you have to follow the curious case of God and gays in the Bible…

Now, it will do no good to say, "Yes! The Bible says God hates gays," on the one hand; or "Baloney! The Bible is irrelevant," on the other. Both responses are fruit of a common seed: ignorance of the Bible.

The Bible "has the ring of truth," said J.B. Phillips upon close enough examination of it to produce his widely-used paraphrased Bible.

The Bible is true because "it is true to what is," said Dr. Francis Schaeffer upon examining the major world philosophies in light of the Bible.

The Bible claims that God is speaking from its pages. If he is, the Bible makes perfect sense while making sense of the world; if he is not, then nothing makes sense....

Continue reading "THE CURIOUS CASE OF GOD AND GAYS" »

Posted by paul at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey, ladies—and guys, too—here‘s one for you: while the Bible, and by association the Christian faith, is often accused of being patriarchal and sexist, the curious case of the guy with gals spills the beans on all the accusers.

They are just plain wrong and are themselves the ones playing the sexist game. I should know; because I, too, like the fellow in the Bible am a guy with gals.

Hold on…guy with gals?

Lest someone take this the wrong way and think we are running a rumor mill about the pastor‘s harem let me clarify what I mean…?

First, as to "sexism:" as used here sexism labels an array of attitudes and actions by which a supposed male dominated society devalues femaleness. Nowhere, we are told, is this more glaring than in the Bible; and in the Bible, a fundamental biblical institution tells the tale most clearly—in marriage a woman takes her husband‘s name. The idea of Mary Smith becoming Mrs. John Doe comes from the early biblical account of Eve being called "woman for she was taken out of man" (Genesis 2:23). How sexist can you get?

Well, without going too deeply into the theology of matrimony, suffice it to say that when read in the simple context of what is real, the early Genesis account refutes sexism by placing equal value on maleness and femaleness as unique compliments of being human. While fulfilling different roles, man and woman in union comprise the fundamental unit of humanity, not man or woman in isolation. It is the drive to isolate that produces sexism, whether the impetus rises in feminism or patriarchy.

The foregoing cries out for pages of explanation, but I resist; and I dare to because the Bible‘s case against sexism comes out most clearly in interesting ways where least expected; as in the curious case of the guy with gals...

Continue reading "THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE GUY WITH GALS" »

Posted by paul at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)